Social media Archives : Suki Wessling, writer

Armchair expertise strikes again

Posted on October 27, 2021October 27, 2021 by Suki

I have to tell you: I am so relieved that my neighbors commenting on our local fire department’s Facebook page are such skilled wildland fire fighters that they know exactly what went wrong with a controlled burn near my town a couple of weeks ago. To think that the burn had been entrusted to people who have studied, trained, and risked their lives for years—people who need to be paid, outfitted, and managed!

Really, if the crowd on social media had been in charge, it would been just fine.

Not.

Have you noticed that Armchair Expertise seems to be at an all-time high? After I used the phrase “armchair traveler” with my students recently, I did research to find out where it came from [here’s the answer]. That was the same day that my neighbors exploded with “advice” for the fire fighters whose controlled burn, meant to mitigate fire risk in the hills nearby, jumped the lines and was briefly the talk of the neighborhood.

Fortunately, the fire fighters did just fine without my neighbors’ help.

I realize that know-it-all advice from people who can’t be bothered to get up and actually help probably started with the cavemen….

You know, Ogg, if you’d used a flint-tipped arrow instead of that spear, you might have brought home more meat for me.

…but lately, it’s become a reflex, enabled by the media people consume and fueled by the ease of social media.

It all started with reality

Reality TV, that is. I truly believe that the rise of Reality TV in the 90s is at the root of a lot of our recent cultural changes. Personally, I never watched it. But I did notice a change in how people seemed to perceive their role in events that didn’t concern them.

Before Reality TV, people tended to get a view of events that excluded them. When you watched the evening TV news, you didn’t expect that your opinion would be addressed. And when you watched a fictional storyline unfold, you had no sense that you, an everyday person, were in there. It was fiction, created for entertainment. News was information, created to inform you.

Reality TV, along with 24-hour cable news, did away with that separation. We were supposed to believe that the Survivors really were fighting for their lives, and that we really could be one of them. We were led to believe that our opinions about the news were of equal importance to the news itself.

Then reality went social

It got worse with the arrival of social media. Suddenly, you didn’t have to take out a piece of paper and write, find a stamp and send, when you wanted to express your opinion. You didn’t actually have to show up at your school board meeting. You didn’t even have to face your real, live neighbors when you could just pretend to be a neighbor on NextDoor.

There was a lot of pushback in the past about the “gatekeepers” who were controlling the media and not allowing real voices in. These days, it feels like we could use a few gatekeepers!

The result: a lack of respect for expertise

Armchair everythings abound in our society. Armchair epidemiologists argue with the people who actually went to school and actually learned how to read data. Armchair legislators hate everything their government does but can’t be bothered to get to work to make change. Armchair psychologists can tell you exactly what’s wrong with you, but apparently haven’t learned the phrase, “physician, heal thyself.”

In many cases, this false expertise is pretty harmless. Yeah, it’s really annoying to hear your buddy who never held a movie camera critiquing a cinematographer’s camera angles, but the only person who looks bad is him.

But it really makes me sad to watch a group of people criticize the fire fighters who are out there—right that moment—busting their asses to protect the people criticizing them. The fire fighters did, indeed, let a controlled burn slip its bounds. “But remember,” I felt like yelling into my computer, “they were doing that burn at risk to their own lives to save your miserable hide!”

And I don’t even want to go into the public vitriol that has led a record number of public health employees to leave their jobs.

Armchairs are for sitting

I don’t think that being the citizen of a democracy should be a spectator sport. Of course, if it turns out that there was negligence on the part of a public employee, that should be exposed. Our democracy secures checks and balances and a free press for just that reason.

But this armchair criticism of every single action of our skilled public employees is doing no favors to our democracy. So many people can’t be bothered to take part in our public discourse without constantly trying to undermine others, as if they think they are contestants on Survivor, hoping to be the last one on the island.

All alone.

With no one else there to put out their fires.

Are you suffering from outrage addiction, my friend?

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Suki

I am a strong curator of my social media feed. When people I follow post back-to-back ugliness, I unfollow them. I’ve read the research and I know that a steady peek into the ugliest parts of their souls is not good for my mental health.

But then the 2020 election happened, and everyone was outraged. Conservatives were outraged, liberals were outraged, middle-of-the-road why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along people were outraged. We became a culture of outrage. Unlike some people I know, I didn’t leave social media, but I definitely limited my engagement.

There was a palpable drop-off in outrage after Biden’s inauguration. Most people not on the fringes moved on. But some of the people I know seemed, for lack of a better word, stuck in outrage. Outrage had become their drug of choice, and they simply couldn’t stop.

I started unfollowing people whose feeds were stuck in pointless outrage. In a few cases I attempted to post moderating comments, but the ugliness of the responses gave me pause. I decided I needed to calm my own brain and I unfollowed them all.

Righteous anger is not outrage

There’s a place for—and a grand tradition of—righteous anger in our culture. Righteous anger is focused and in its own way positive: its goal is to get people to sit up and take notice.

The BLM protests were initially fueled by righteous anger. And though they had been lied to and misled, a lot of right-wing voters who believed that our election was stolen were also initially inspired by righteous anger.

But I make a distinction when I use the word outrage. Outrage is a knee-jerk reaction that is unfocused and has no particular end-goal:

If you’re outraged by racism, you yell a lot, you riot, or you live in anger and fear.
If you are experiencing righteous anger about racism, you take part in peaceful protests, you communicate the reality of the problem to others, and you vote.
If you’re outraged by voting issues, you yell a lot, you riot, or you decide not to vote because it’s pointless.
If you are experiencing righteous anger about voting issues, you learn about how the system works, you read the data, you get involved to keep the election secure, and you vote.

This year has given us plenty of examples…

like racism

The BLM protests did a lot of good. They focused the attention of a lot of well-meaning white people in power whose attention really hadn’t been focused. People influenced by righteous anger got to work and pressured their lawmakers and their communities to do better.

But when you look at the outrage that accompanied the righteous anger, there was a fair amount of collateral damage. Property was damaged, people were harmed or killed, and lots of fundamentally decent people got really nasty in their social media feeds.

Righteous anger fueled real, positive change. Outrage fueled anger, depression, alienation.

and voting rights: on the right…

The concern over voting rights is shared by people all over the political spectrum. America without secure elections is not America, that’s clear. But on all sides of the political spectrum, you see the difference in outcomes between outrage and righteous anger.

On the right, people who listened to outrageous lies felt their outrage grow. Righteous anger would have led them to listen to conservative politicians and officials who did the research and found the facts. But the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were not fueled by righteous anger. Clearly, there is no logical world in which breaking windows and zip-tying Nancy Pelosi would end in a more secure vote.

There were those on the right who had, if not righteous anger, well-researched concerns. And you may have heard their voices if you were reading the mainstream press. But right-wing media feeds on outrage at this particular time, so that’s what most conservatives heard (and continue to hear). Conservatives who actually understand election security seem to be screaming into a void.

…and the left

The left wasn’t immune to voting rights outrage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard—and saw in my social media feed in the last year—people saying things like “all politicians are the same so my vote isn’t important” or “the party has the vote rigged.” My observation is that this attitude is more common in younger adults, but there may be other factors than youth. Lack of interest in or understanding of the political process is probably also a factor. Although this may not feel like outrage, this attitude is often accompanied by outrage responses to particular triggering topics such as immigration. The same people who rail against Democrats being “as bad as Republicans” generally don’t take the positive steps that result from righteous anger. They just get pissed off and alienated.

I’ve had to turn off feeds from liberal friends because now that they got what they wanted, they are continuing to bang their nasty words against that wall of outrage. Their hatred of any politician who disagrees on policy is intense, immediately writing them off as “racist” or “in the pocket of corporations” if they don’t agree on the best way to solve a problem.

How are you feeling?

I’m worried about you, friends who are still fueled by outrage. I did turn you off, it’s true, but I think of you and hope that you will be able to step off the outrage machine. It’s not good for your health or for our society.

I believe that we need lots of righteous anger. We have so many difficult problems to address in this country, and so little agreement on how to address them (and sometimes, so little agreement as to whether there’s a problem at all).

But I’d like to see the smart, fun, creative, and energetic people around me step back and assess whether their righteous anger is giving them the energy they need to solve problems, or if they’re allowing their outrage to make them part of a problem.

What does Facebook know about you? Do you care?

Posted on April 20, 2018April 20, 2018 by Suki

I am a reluctantly happy user of Facebook. So many of its qualities are fabulous. I love being able to click on the feed of a friend or family member and find out what’s happening in their lives. I love getting up-to-date information from groups that I follow. I love being able to spread my own news, both business and personal, in a fun, interactive way.

But like many users, I am extremely skeptical of giving away my privacy to a corporation. In fact, I’d say I’m probably more skeptical than most avid users of Facebook. I try very hard not to post much public information, I have never given Facebook my birthdate or the identities of relatives who don’t share my last name, and I never, ever click on ads or apps within Facebook.

What Facebook knows about me

Apparently my diligence has paid off. Facebook, in response to a number of factors including pressure from the EU and that whole “oops, we let Russians subvert our elective process” thang, is rolling out a new feature where you can find out what they know about you.

I can imagine that for some of my readers and many of my Facebook friends, what they know about you—meaning, the information about you that they have sold to random corporations you have no knowledge of—will be shocking. As soon as I started using Facebook, I noticed that many of my very intelligent, well-educated friends were giving Facebook their lives: real birth dates, dates and birthplaces of their children, companies they do business with, etc. It shocked me that they weren’t more circumspect.

However, what Facebook revealed to me yesterday is more shocking. Please scoot to the edge of your seat now:

I, one of the palest, limp-hairedest, blue-eyedest residents of California, am African-American.

Or, um, maybe that just means I have an affinity for African-American culture? Not sure. But it definitely gave me a giggle.

Not because I have any problem being identified this way. As you may know, I play jazz, which many believe to be the single greatest contribution to American culture by any ethnic group. I’m a writer and love many of the great African-American writers who have enriched our canon. Although I strongly agree that white privilege affects all of us no matter how we try to resist it, I feel that as very pale people go I do a pretty good job of taking people for who they are and not pre-judging them by the physical characteristics of their ancestors.

However, I giggled because Facebook really doesn’t get me. And Facebook doesn’t get me because I haven’t let it get at me.

More things Facebook got wrong

It’s all relative, Facebook. Yeah, I did try to get away from my family by moving to California, then the whole darn lot of them followed me, contributing greatly to the Great California Population Explosion that makes me fume when I sit in traffic Every Darn Day.

And, I will remind you, Facebook, I live in Santa Cruz. In Santa Cruz, my politics count as, well, conservatively moderate. I know people who think that the government is dousing us with chemicals from the tailpipes of jets. I know people who believe that we should have laws making it illegal to disagree on certain topics. Believe me, “very” is definitely relative!

The state of my relationship with Facebook

I described myself as “reluctantly happy.” I think that a Facebook-like platform is an important part of what the Internet does for us. I love the way it connects me with the physical world, the way it connects me with the past, the way it gives me ideas for the future.

But Facebook doesn’t have “rights.” Corporations are not people. People are people and have rights. I’m thrilled that the EU is taking this up, given that our government is too dysfunctional to do much of anything. I’m hoping California takes it up, too, since our market is so huge the pressure is too much for a corporation to resist. (See the auto emissions argument playing out right now. And yes, I know that it’s unlikely that CA will do anything to resist the tech industry.)

But aside from what our governments can do, we all have a personal responsibility to know what Facebook is taking from us and not to give it willingly if we don’t want to.

Recommitting to my Facebook use principles

Here’s the plan I’ve been following that has led Facebook to believe I am African-American and estranged from my family:

Don’t ever give Facebook personal information it doesn’t deserve. No birthdate. No phone number. No family associations.
Keep all personal information private to “friends only.”
Don’t accept “friends” that I don’t have some sort of relationship with IRL (some quite distant, but I could actually knock on these people’s doors!).
Don’t click on ads. Ever.
Don’t use associated apps. Ever.
Never use Facebook to log into other platforms, no matter how tempting it may be.
Always view my News Feed sorted by “most recent” rather than recommended. This isn’t a popularity contest.

So far, it’s worked. Seeya in my News Feed.